E-audiobook
Comeback a Parker novel
Record details
- ISBN: 9780792793922 (electronic audio bk.)
- ISBN: 0792793927 (electronic audio bk.)
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Physical Description:
electronic resource
remote
1 online resource (1 sound file) : digital. - Publisher: [North Kingstown, R.I.] : AudioGO, 2013.
Content descriptions
| Participant or Performer Note: | Read by Keith Szarabajka. |
| Source of Description Note: | Description based on publisher supplied image on web page (viewed Apr. 9, 2013) |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Parker (Fictitious character) -- Fiction Criminals -- Fiction FICTION / General |
| Genre: | Mystery fiction. Audiobooks. Downloadable audio books. |
Other Formats and Editions
Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 July 1997
This novel represents a kind of star turn for Donald E. Westlake, kind of like in 1968, when Wilt Chamberlain decided to lead the NBA in assists instead of scoring, just to demonstrate total mastery of his world. Writing as Richard Stark, Westlake has rested his immensely popular, hilariously star-crossed thief, Dortmunder, to resurrect Parker, one of the coldest, hardest, most resolute SOBs ever to appear in noir. In Comeback, Parker teams up with two men and a woman to steal $400,000 in small bills from a sleazy televangelist's "Christian Crusade." The heist goes off perfectly--until one of the crew attempts to eliminate his partners to claim the whole score. Parker's innate calculation and mistrust save his life. His sense of criminal realpolitik requires him to hunt down and kill his traitorous former partner. Structurally, the novel resembles a Dortmunder caper; the well-laid plans of a highly professional criminal go awry, and the crook-hero must improvise a bookful of stratagems to finally possess what he set out to steal. But the similarity ends there. The voice, feel, and characterizations here are gritty and chillingly noir, as different from Westlake's comic novels as Miss Marple is from Mike Hammer. Wilt startled the NBA with his turn, and Westlake/Stark is likely to do the same--at least for those who know only the Dortmunder books. For the rest of us, he succeeds in demonstrating his total mastery of crime fiction. ((Reviewed July 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1997 September
~ Following in the footsteps of fellow-thief Bernie Rhodenbarr, Stark's hero Parker returns from a 20-year retirement in this taut caper, which begins with a routine $400,000 heist from the Reverend William Archibald's Christian Crusade (the inside man, Tom Carmody, is an angel who's gotten religion and thinks money is the root of the Rev.'s evil). The sequel would be routine, too, if Carmody hadn't told his girlfriend about the heist, and if the girlfriend hadn't told her none-too-bright kid brother, and if the brother hadn't told a couple of his lowlife friends, and if one of the original thieves hadn't decided he didn't want to split the take with the others, and if the nominal good guys--Archibald's semper fi security chief Dwayne Thorsen and sadistic local police detective Lew Calavecci--weren't a pair of borderline psychopaths. The high points are Parker's taking a bribe to look for the money he's stolen himself, and his trying to put out a fire by throwing a bullet-ridden body on it. But the real thrill is seeing Parker back in action again in a world where all the key players are so completely on the same wavelength that they know exactly what everybody else will do, and where each ruse and double-cross is good only till nightfall. If you're new to Stark's work, think of all the comic Dortmunder capers he's written under his real name--Donald E. Westlake--but with as baleful an absence of humor as in The Ax (p. 753). Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 1997 August #1
Donald E. Westlake is having a good year: The Ax (Forecasts, Apr. 21), is off and running; he'll soon be crowned with Anthony Life Achievement honors. Now, after a 23-year hiatus (since Butcher's Moon), he gives us his 21st book in the now legendary Parker series, written under his Richard Stark pseudonym. Parker's return is one of the most striking achievements in Westlake's long and varied career. Energy and imagination light up virtually every page, as does some of the best hard-boiled prose ever to grace the noir genre. Parker and his longtime lady friend, Claire, are enjoying their New Jersey lakeside home, Parker "being someone whose work let him stay at home for periods of time and then took him away sometimes." That cool understatement crystallizes Stark's style: Parker's "work," of course, consists of being a very good, often very violent, professional thief. His latest job makes him part of a plan to remove a large sum of cash from a glossy TV preacher named William Archibald. But the heist goes wrong from the start and turns into a tense, chaotic ballet of betrayal and death. One of Parker's partners is a weak babbler, another is a cold traitor. Archibald's security chief, an ex-marine, is a tenacious pursuer, intent on getting back his employer's money. Along the way, readers learn how to hide crooks, cars and cash in a small city with an efficient police force; how to escape from a variety of traps and sealed rooms; and, most of all, how Parker has managed to stay alive in readers' minds as well as in the for all these years. (Oct.) Copyright 1998 Publishers Weekly Reviews
